I've spent years telling people to eat better, move more and sleep more. The first two get nods. The third one gets a look that says thanks, genius.

Few people need convincing that sleep matters, most people are stuck on how. And past the usual advice about dark rooms and no phone in bed, I never had much to give them.

Until now.

Here's what happens to a lot of people when you're tired. You get in bed, close your eyes and your brain starts talking.

It replays the dumb thing you said at work. It reminds you about the bill. It builds a whole plan for a conversation you might have next week. You're exhausted, but your head won't shut up.

There's a trick to quiet that. It's called cognitive shuffling, and you can try it tonight.

Pick a word that's five to twelve letters long and doesn't mean much to you. Blanket. Planet. Kitchen. Don't pick money or deadline or anything that'll set you worrying.

Now go letter by letter. Think of as many unrelated words as you can that start with each letter. If you picked bedtime, you start with B. Bagel. Basket. Butterfly. Bicycle. Spend a second or two picturing each one. Not a perfect picture. Just a quick snapshot. Then move to E. Envelope. Egypt. Emerald.

Keep the words unrelated. That's important. If your brain starts building a story out of them, it's not working anymore.

Pick a word with no repeating letters. Once you've used up every O word you can think of, hitting a second O later means making that same list all over again, and that's when your mind wanders back to the bill. Google is a bad pick. Two Gs and two Os. Planet is a good one. Six different letters.

You probably won't finish the word, and that's the point.

Counting sheep is supposed to do the same job, and it almost never does. That's because counting is too boring. Your brain gets tired of being bored and goes right back to whatever was bugging you. Shuffling gives it just enough to do. Come up with a word, hold it, picture it, move on. Busy, but not interesting enough to wake you up.

There's a second reason it works. During the day your brain runs fast and solves problems. Falling asleep means drifting into something loose and scattered, where one thought doesn't lead to the next. Shuffling makes your brain do the scattered thing on purpose, so it quits trying to fix tomorrow. You're not fighting the worry. You're doing what your brain was already trying to do.

OK, is there proof it works?

Sort of.

Luc Beaudoin, the cognitive scientist who came up with it, tested it in 2016 on 154 college students. Their sleep got better. But everybody in that study got some kind of help, so there's no way to know how much came from the trick itself. It was also a conference poster, not a full paper in a science journal. And Beaudoin sells an app that runs the exercise for you. None of that means he's wrong. It means the best study we have was run by the person with the most to gain from it, and it hasn't been repeated by anybody else.

The bigger idea has held up better. In 2002, Allison Harvey tested something similar on people with insomnia. The ones told to picture something interesting fell asleep faster than the ones given no instructions at all. In 2013, Les Gellis ran a study on college students using the same basic move, and their sleep scores improved too.

So giving your brain something else to look at has real support behind it. Just be aware this particular version is still mostly untested.

There are some people this won't help. This method is for a busy brain, not a broken night.

If you snore and wake up wrecked, if you've slept badly for months, if a new medicine changed things, none of this touches that. See a doctor. Ask about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. It's the real treatment for chronic sleep problems and it has decades of research behind it.

Some people also can't make pictures in their heads. It's called aphantasia, and it's more common than most folks realize. If picturing a goat feels like work instead of rest, this isn't your tool.

One last thing. Don't turn it into homework. If you're lying there grading your own mental pictures, you've just built yourself a new thing to stress about.

And if you're still awake after ten minutes, you're fine. That's normal. It's watching the clock that keeps you up. Better to lie there thinking about bagels than about your rent.

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Reference Links:

A design-based approach to sleep-onset and insomnia: super-somnolent mentation, the cognitive shuffle and serial diverse imagining

Luc P. Beaudoin
2014 Cognitive Science Society conference, Date created 2014-07-24

Click Here for the Paper: https://summit.sfu.ca/item/17237

 

Cognitive Refocusing Treatment for Insomnia: A Randomized Controlled Trial in University Students

Les A. Gellis, Danielle Arigo, Jennifer C. Elliott
Behavior Therapy, Published Volume 44, Issue 1, March 2013, Pages 100-110

Click Here for the Study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2012.07.004

 

The management of unwanted pre-sleep thoughts in insomnia: distraction with imagery versus general distraction

Allison G. Harvey, Suzanna Payne
ScienceDirect Behaviour Research and Therapy, Published online 13 January 2002

Click Here for the Study: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(01)00012-2

 

Serial diverse imagining task: A new remedy for bedtime complaints of worrying and other sleep-disruptive mental activity

Beaudoin, Luc P., Digdon, N., O’Neill, K., Racour, G.
Poster presented at SLEEP 2016, the joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, Denver, CO., Presented 2016-03-17

Click Here for the Information Archived in Simon Fraser University's Summit repository: https://summit.sfu.ca/item/16196

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8/28/2026